Life & Wisdom Quote by Augusten Burroughs

“Marriage is overdone” is the kind of provocation Burroughs uses to puncture piety without pretending he’s above the mess. The word “overdone” doesn’t mean obsolete; it means culturally overcooked: a dish we keep reheating because we don’t know what else to serve. He’s swatting at the industry around marriage as much as the institution itself: the moral applause, the narrative template, the promise that one legal-romantic container can organize a life cleanly.

Then he pivots: “As long as there are people, people are going to find it interesting.” That line is less endorsement than diagnosis. Marriage persists not because it reliably delivers happiness, but because it reliably delivers plot. It’s an arena where desire, status, fear, money, dependency, and reinvention collide under public rules. Burroughs is pointing to the entertainment value of social constraint: we’re drawn to watching people try to live inside a script, then watching the script crack.

The subtext is classic Burroughs: intimacy is chaotic, families are weird, and institutions don’t tame either; they just give them costumes. Contextually, it lands in a late-20th/early-21st century moment when marriage is both contested and commodified, argued over in courts and sold in magazines. Burroughs refuses the tidy take (pro- or anti-). He’s saying: you can get bored of the ceremony, the ideology, the marketing. You won’t get bored of the human appetite for pairing up, breaking apart, and making meaning out of the wreckage.